Many and Diverse Cases: Q-Adjectives and Conjunction

Overview. This paper provides an account for patterns of conjunction of the adjectives of quantity (Q-adjectives) many and few with ordinary gradable adjectives, as in (1), and explores its consequences for the semantics of Q-adjectives and the elements they combine with. (1) a. Prof. Smith's many and important contributions to imaging science… b. The trees in the grove were many and tall c. The lights in the room were few and dim The Broader Issue. The 'quantifiers' many, few, much and little have long been recognized to exhibit morphological and distributional parallels to gradable adjectives, leading to proposals that they also have adjectival semantics, i.e. (gradable) predicates of individuals (Milsark 1977 among others). On the other hand, Kayne (2005) proposes that these terms are in fact modifiers of an unpronounced noun NUMBER or AMOUNT, such that few people has the structure few NUMBER people, an analysis that captures its similarity to a small number of people. Along the same lines, Schwarzschild (2006) proposes that Q-adjectives, like 'partitive' measure phrases (2 feet in 2 feet of cable), occur in the specifier position of a functional head Mon, whose role is to introduce the dimension that the measure phrase or Q-adjective modifies, with the requirement that the dimension be 'monotonic' relative to the substance noun (in that any proper sub-part of the entity described by the substance noun has a lesser degree of the dimension than does the totality). In the case of many/few, that dimension is number (cardinality). Thus on this view, Q-adjectives are predicates of degrees (formalized as scalar intervals), not individuals. The construction exemplified in (1) yields insight into this issue. Initially, the existence of these conjunctions appears compatible with the predicate-of-individuals analysis, and incompatible with the predicate-of-degrees view, given the typical restriction of coordination to elements of the same semantic type. But examination of constraints on this construction demonstrates that it is in fact best explained by the latter account, and that it supports the existence of a phonologically null degree-introducing element in the semantic representation. Constraints on Conjunction. The first crucial observation is that only gradable adjectives are allowable in conjunction with Q-adjectives, as seen in the contrasts in (2) and (3): (2) a. The fans were many and loud (3) a. The stains on the shirt were few and small b. ??The fans were many and American b. ??The stains on the shirt were few and …